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June 26, 2014

(++++) UNBELIEVABLE

Virtual Unreality. By Charles
Seife. Viking. $26.95.

Don’t believe everything you
hear. Or see. Or interact with in any way whatsoever. At least not where the
Internet is concerned. That is the message of New York University journalism
professor Charles Seife’s Virtual
Unreality, and while it is scarcely a new message or a unique one, Seife
delivers it so tellingly, so skillfully and with such a good combination of
serious analysis and humor that he makes it very much worth readers’ attention.
You can probably even believe what he says. Most of it, anyway.

Seife trots out a lot of the
issues with which careful Internet users are already familiar: the downside of
Wikipedia’s openness to its entries being edited by anyone, for example, and
the ease with which the Internet makes it possible to deceive people through
use of a false identity (sockpuppetry). He talks about the frequency with which
people create online personas suffering from disease or disability and then
make use of the outpouring of sympathy from strangers – a phenomenon now
identified within psychological circles and called “‘virtual factitious
disorder’ or, more snappily, ‘Munchausen by internet.’” Seife discuses dating
sites, robot scammers, and the use of Twitter to gather damaging information on
people (such as politicians).

He also delves into some
genuinely significant and potentially worrisome societal changes wrought by the
extent of our everyday interconnectedness. For example, he writes that “an
audience used to be a precious and rare commodity,” using as an example the
Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park in London, which provides “an opportunity to
speak in front of a receptive crowd of a respectable size – a size that few
speakers are dynamic and interesting enough to draw on their own.” Speakers’
Corner, though, now coexists with an audience-gathering tool far more powerful
and far-reaching (literally far-reaching, across the globe): “Then came the
internet. The audience problem had vanished. The internet’s vast
interconnectivity made it possible for everyone to hear everyone else – and to
be heard by everyone else. This is perhaps the most important and radical
change wrought by digital information. …Your audience is potentially the
world.”

And other changes, arguably
of almost the same level of importance, abound, and Seife talks about them as
well. “A digital copy, if properly done, is absolutely identical to the
original – in some sense, there’s no point in talking about ‘original’ and
‘copy,’ because neither has any greater claim to authenticity. …The advent of
cheap, perfect digital copies completely destroyed a number of ways we humans
used to think about information. For one thing, it utterly demolished the basis
for a market in goods made out of information, such as books, newspapers,
movies, and recordings of music. …[The] replication barrier was fundamental….
Digital information dynamited the very foundations of the market for
information goods.”

And there is more in Virtual Unreality, a short (248-page)
book whose contents go way, way beyond its page count. However, it is a book, not an Internet screed. And
it is one that uses the medium of print in ways that digital media cannot quite
match – Seife has, for example, a “Chapter 5½.” Clearly there is still a place
for ink-on-dead-trees, comparatively-difficult-to-reproduce information – a
fact that is clear from the very existence of this book, although not from the
arguments within it. Seife correctly points out that although information dissemination is, or can be, free and
instantaneous, information itself “is expensive. It takes time and effort to
uncover something unexpected and to turn that information into something that’s
usable and interesting.” The ethical and moral issues of information creation
and distribution are ones with which Seife has been personally involved, and he
writes about them trenchantly as well as entertainingly – the latter when, for
example, he discusses being asked to find out if there were any plagiarism or
reuse problems in a certain writer’s work: “Why, yes. There were.”

In fact, Seife handles
complex and difficult issues of the digital society with intelligence and
understanding throughout Virtual
Unreality, his knowledge and analytical ability making the book one
absolutely worth reading. But there is a caveat
here, and it has to do with the point
of the book. There is always a push-pull in analytical works about societal
issues between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and it is usually in the
latter area – what to do about what
the author describes – that social-commentary books fall short. Seife’s
prescriptions, presented in an appendix aptly titled “The Top Ten Dicta of the
Internet Skeptic,” make a far better effort than most to help readers cope with
the problems that the book elucidates. Examples include “Everybody’s a fake. At
least that’s what you should assume” and “The early bird gets the worm. The
late bird gets the early bird.” These are excellent notions as far as they go,
although in fact it may be better to be an Internet cynic than a mere skeptic.
The real concern here, though – and perhaps Seife will address it in yet
another traditionally published book, this one being his sixth – is in knowing
how to be a sensible and informed “Internet consumer,” not sucked into the marketing morass of instantaneous
interconnection and not victimized by
rumor and innuendo and generalized misinformation, but being able to maximize
the value of the most powerful communications medium we humans have yet
devised. Stay tuned, as they (whoever “they” are) say. Or used to say.